Game Design going backwards

ShyGuyXXL

Shyster Guyster
Diamond City Insider
Don't you hate this?
Picture this:
The first game in a series establishes a game mechanic, the second game makes a great improvement to it, and then for some reason the third game completely ignores it and just uses the first game as a basis again, as if the second game never happened, even though it was so obviously better WITH that improvement and nothing would've been lost if they had kept that small but significant change.
That just screams tone-deafness. And it's simply frustrating when it feels like you, as a fan, seem to know more about the series than the developers themselves, who should know the ins and outs of their games down to the smallest little insignificant details.

One example for this is Katamari Forever. In the second game you could restart any level as soon as the round ended.
This was REALLY useful in a stage where the round ends as soon as you touch one specific type of object.
But in Katamari Forever, you can't do that anymore. Instead you have to sit through the rating screen every time (including loading screens) and THEN you can choose to retry. This is horrible in a level where you can fail at any time if you just make a little mistake.
So one wrong move and it's loading screens and dialog skipping for you!
And as anyone who has played a difficult game knows: The longer it takes until you can try a challenge again, the more frustrated you get inbetween.
If you can try it again right away then you have to time to get frustrated.

There's no excuse for this. Why make the player sit through evaluations that won't matter anyway?
You can choose to retry BEFORE you have messed up, why not after?
This was supposed to be a "best of" compilation. But apparently they didn't think about including the best of the quality of life features.

...but I digress.

Another lost detail is from Twilight Princess, where fairies don't get used up if you touch them while having full health. That way you can bottle them up without having to worry about accidentally wasting them. This was apparently not the case in Skyward Sword.

What about you? Can you think of stuff like this? What kind of lost improvements piss you off the most?
 
Oh, I forgot:
Another ruined feature is right here in my signature (as of right now):
UMf9RD1.gif

This always happens in Pikmin 3.
It sometimes happened in Pikmin 1.
But it never happened in Pikmin 2.

One or more Pikmin try to grab a moving object, get stuck, wiggle around, never reach their target, and then just give up.
I don't get how they didn't catch this during testing. It happens all the frickin time.
Makes you not wanna try to maximize your efficiency, since you'll just end up having to waste time babysitting incompetent Pikmin anyway.

They got it right in 2, so why not in 3? Like I wrote, they better have this completely fixed in 4!
 
Contra Rebirth pissed me off with how it threw out Shattered Soldier's immensely useful ability to lock fire in one direction while moving because this ia r3tr0 thr0wback d00d!!
 
Back
Top